What's the buzz?

I finally have finished these buggers!

This swarm of Vespa crabro was quite a fun little detour from my normal fare. An interesting diversion, and fairly amusing too. I found myself snickering fairly regularly with these. I also have to confess to having dive bombed my amazingly patient wife with them on a few occasions over the course of the project.

Available time and energy sent me looking for other options beyond my original idea to re-cast the wings in clear resin. I moved on to thoghts of fashioning them out of acrylic sheeting and possibly sculpting in the details. Then I found 'Illusion Film' which is polycarbonate sheets with lenticular patterning in them to give a sort of holographic effect. This stuff ended up being the magic bullet and allowing me to pull this project to a close with a lot less hassle than I was originally envisioning.









I may take another picture to demonstrate the wing effect better as these were taken with diffused lighting, and so the patterns don't pop quite as much as it does in person.

There are higher quality versions of the images on flickr if you're interested.

Also, if you're in the UK these will be buzzing around the table at the Frotherheim participation game at Salute 2010 this April.

Too Yoots

These are the youthful new recruits for my gang. Since they aren't full warriors yet, I left them in random clothes rather than give them uniforms. The left one has some weirdness going on with the eyes on the casting... Not much I could do to fix or hide that. Oh well.



Next up. . . I'm not sure. It depends on when my paint order gets here.

Zen and the art of warband building

I've been slowly working on my 2nd Mordheim band on and off over the last year- getting the figures collected, weapon conversions done, and the most tedious task- cutting off all the integral bases and pinning the feet to custom resin bases. Even though I set myself no deadline and knew since it would be 3rd or 4th priority that it would take a while, its still nice to finally be moving a step forward.

I've finished my first two gang members; the fighting monks. The figures are from the Perry Brothers samurai range. I gave them chinese fantasy weapons from Wyrd, and made the hat out of putty as seen elsewhere on this blog. They fill the role of the Cossacks in the Kislev list I'm basing this off of, so they hate skaven and chaos. I thought that was a good role for monks. I'm shooting for a quick but effective paint job on this gang. I think I pretty much nailed it here, though in retrospect I could have blended their robes a little bit more. Ah well. Progress!

News from the front.

New news on the hornet wings yet, hopefully this weekend will bring some progress in one way or another.

A few weeks ago I dug into the Closet of Woe and pulled out some modern era soviet troops from Devil Dog Design. I picked these up a few years ago thinking to try out gaming some Modern or Twilight2K skirmish actions at some point. I spent quite a while looking around for modern figures that I liked, and while there are a decent selection out there for NATO troops, their likely opponents are few and far between. I settled on Devil Dog as they had a decent selection and decent quality. Now that I've actually opened the packs and tinkered with the figures, the quality is a little less than I'd originally thought- but they are OK. The multiple heads is a great idea, but as with many interchangable part designs, the execution is a little lacking and it basically means every possibility is a poor fit and needs some work. That being said, I still think these will be just fine for gaming. I did this guy as a quick diversion while I was in the middle of some other stuff. Total painting time is probably 1hour. The camo is based on the Bulgarian Mountain Commando uniform from the 80s/90s.